Lecture
Tokugawa Ieyasu as Medicine King
- Date
- Thursday 3 December 2026
- Time
- Series
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.11
Abstract
Tokugawa Ieyasu died in 1616 and was deified twice. The first had made him a stand-alone kami (Shinto god), but the second redefined him as an avatar. Avatars are emanations of Buddhas, and the one selected for Ieyasu was the Buddha of Medicine. This made sense, for that Buddha’s perfect world lies in the east, where Edo was, and from where Ieyasu had brought peace after a century of war (they claimed), curing the bleeding land. Profound medical interests were posthumously attributed to him, and the instruments with which Ieyasu concocted remedies were adduced to prove this. The Buddha of Medicine was central to the Tendai school, long associated with protection of the state, and the affiliation of Ieyasu’s mentor and adviser, the great abbot Tenkai. Prayers to the Buddha of Medicine became, by extension, prayers to the kami that Ieyasu had become, who, in turn, could mediate between humanity and that Buddha, and protect the state, which his descendant ruled. Tenkai was abbot of the Tendai complex at Nikkō, and he secured relocation of Ieyasu’s body there. This became the focus of a nationwide web of shrine-temples, all deferring to the shine-temple-mausoleum itself at Nikkō. This lecture will look at the ongoing worship of Ieyasu as healer throughout the Edo Period.
About the speaker
Timon Screech taught the history of Japanese art at SOAS, University of London, for 30 years, before moving to a chair at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, in 2021. He has also been guest professor at numerous institutions in the EU, Japan and USA. Screech is the author of some dozen books and many articles on the visual culture of the Japan’s early-modern Edo period. His PhD, published as The Lens Within the Heart, remains in print in a second, paperback edition. Perhaps best-known is his Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820, which is also available in Chinese, Japanese and Polish translations. His field-defining study, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan was published in 2012. In 2020 he published two further books, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan and Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (also available in Chinese). His major monograph Shogun Avatar: The Worship of Tokugawa in Early-Modern Japan will appear in 2026. He is concurrently working on two further books to appear in Japanese, one on early European contacts with the Kingdom of Lūchū (J: Ryūkyū, modern Okinawa), the other on tourist activities by the Dutch East India Company in Japan. His long-term project is a history of the Rokuhara district of Kyoto. Screech is a Freeman of the City of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europæa, and the Royal Society of Art. In 2022 he was awarded both the Yamagata Bantō Prize, and the Fukuoka Culture Prize, and in 2024 received the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation.